Khaled Hosseini's new novel stretches beyond Afghanistan

By Georgia Rowe

Correspondent

Posted:
05/21/2013 12:00:00 AM PDT

Updated:
05/21/2013 01:52:17 PM PDT

Khaled Hosseini is a consummate storyteller. Some of his earliest memories are of entertaining parents, siblings and cousins at family gatherings in his native Afghanistan. He began writing at a young age. Publishing, he says, was "a very private and hidden dream -- one I probably didn't admit even to myself."

All that changed in 2003, when Hosseini's debut novel, "The Kite Runner," propelled him to worldwide acclaim. Set in Afghanistan, the book became a runaway best-seller -- as did his second novel, 2007's "A Thousand Splendid Suns."

This month marks the arrival of Hosseini's third novel -- "And the Mountains Echoed" (Riverhead Books, $28.95, 416 pages), his most ambitious to date.

Author Khaled Hosseini in his San Jose office Thursday, May 2, 2013. The South Bay author earned a loyal following with the bestselling novels âÄúThe Kite RunnerâÄù and âÄúA Thousand Splendid Suns.âÄù Now he is about to publish âÄúAnd the Mountains Echoed.âÄù (Patrick Tehan/Bay Area News Group)
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Patrick Tehan
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With settings in Afghanistan, France, Greece and California, the book spans decades and generations. It's a large-scale meditation on loss and redemption, poverty and privilege, and the twists of fate that wrench families apart. In an interview in San Jose, where he lives with his wife and two children, Hosseini says it represents a new approach.

"It's a bit of a departure for me," he says. "The structure is different from my two previous novels, which were fairly linear, with one or two central characters. This book is sort of a choir.

"The home base is still Afghanistan, and the main characters still have ties to Afghanistan. But it's also set in other parts of the world. The struggles in Afghanistan play a role, but not with the same immediacy of the first two books; I would say that this is my least political book."

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Inspiration came with a single image: a man walking across the desert, pulling a wagon. Inside the wagon was a young girl, and walking a few paces behind was a boy. "Who these people were and where they were going, I had no idea," says Hosseini. "But the image came to me with perfect clarity."

Those children became Abdullah and his sister, Pari, who, as the book begins in 1952, walk with their father from a tiny Afghan village to Kabul. Driven by poverty, the father sells Pari to a wealthy couple in the city. "That journey ends up being a transformative event in their lives," says Hosseini. "This rupture, this splitting of the family, is like the proverbial stone thrown into the pond."

The book's final scenes take place in 2010 in San Jose, suggesting that while reunions happen, lost time is never recovered. For Hosseini, who spent 2﻿ 1/2 years writing the book, aging was a central theme.

"In some way, this book is really about how we're all the victims of the passage of time," he says. "I don't think I was that conscious of that 10, 15 years ago." His father, he notes, died about a month after he started the book.

Hosseini was 10 when he left Afghanistan. His father, a diplomat in the Afghan Foreign Ministry, moved the family to France in 1976. They left everything in Kabul, expecting to return in four years. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the family was granted political asylum and moved to San Jose, where Hosseini began medical studies. Trained as an internist, he practiced medicine at a Kaiser hospital in Mountain View from 1999 to 2004.

Throughout, he wrote -- short stories and the novel that became "Kite Runner." Hosseini never expected it to succeed, but when success arrived, he realized he had to make a choice. He gave up his medical practice and focused on writing.

Afghanistan has always been central to his work, and Hosseini admits to feeling conflicted about his homeland. A scene in the new book depicts a relief worker who becomes attached to an injured Afghan child, only to put her out of his mind as soon as he returns to California.

"That part of the story is very autobiographical," he says. "It's difficult to be kind. It takes work, and impulse and empathy alone are not enough."

In recent years, humanitarian work has become Hosseini's third career. In 2006, he was named a goodwill envoy to the United Nations Refugee Agency. He and his wife cofounded the Khaled Hosseini Foundation, which provides aid to Afghanistan's poorest.

Still, writing remains his constant. Each day, after taking his kids to school, he writes until midafternoon. "People ask me, 'Don't you feel pressure to keep writing?' " he says. "I don't at all. I enjoy the process so much of creating -- sitting and losing myself in this other world.

"Sometimes I envision a day when I won't be able to do that, because I won't have anything left to say. That's a real fear, because I always want to keep writing."